All about flying, training, pilot gear, and $100 hamburgers

The FAA written tests (also known as the FAA Airman Knowledge Tests) are one of those things that every pilot dreads. They’re one of those big ugly barriers that stand in between you and your license — and all too often, student pilots wait until the very last minute to take them, adding a huge headache to their training process.

But you don’t need to fear the written.

In fact, as I’ll show you today, a simple study tactic can easily add 20% to your written test score in a single day…

Flying in the Washington D.C. Special Flight Rules Area — or SFRA — isn’t hard, but it does have some important differences from most other parts of the country.

This month, the folks at Potomac TRACON published a NOTAM covering changes to the way flight plans are filed to do pattern work in the SFRA. The changes are pretty minor overall, but the most notable one is the request that pilots include a Fix Radial Distance for their airport in the Route section of the flight plan. That FRD ensures that the National Airspace System computers recognize the flight plan. The FRD stays the same for any airport you’re doing pattern work at.

They also want to see “PATTERN” in the flight plan remarks.

The image below, taken from the NOTAM shows what an example SFRA pattern flight plan at Tipton Airport (KFME) would look like:

This example, from the NOTAM, shows what an SFRA pattern work flight plan at FME would look like.

The requested changes from Potomac are pretty minor — and for those of us who typically file via ForeFlight, it’ll be as easy as doing it once and then copying the flight plan for future pattern work flights.

If you’re not used to flying in the SFRA, I realize it can be a little daunting — even for professional pilots! But if you simply avoid it, you’re missing out on some fantastic airports and a great way to get across the Chesapeake Bay.

If you’re an area pilot looking to get more comfortable with flying VFR in the SFRA, feel free to contact me to set up a familiarization flight and learn the tricks of flying around the nation’s capitol.

The new panel of our Cessna 182 on the ferry flight home from the avionics shop.

[Note: This is the third part of a series on buying and upgrading an airplane. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2.]

There was nothing wrong with our avionics panel setup.

When we bought our Cessna 182Q, the avionics were a major factor in why we bought that particular plane. The highlight of the panel was that it was equipped with dual Garmin GTN 430Ws, and an HSI — everything an instrument-rated pilot needs to fly in the modern IFR system, and then some.

The panel itself was backed with 80s-style faux wood — while it was a little dated and ugly, it was totally functional.

So, when we bought the plane, we didn’t have any plans to change anything inside. We knew we’d need a paint job sooner rather than later, so that was our priority.

[Note: This is the second part of a series on buying and upgrading an airplane. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1.]

In the last installment, we took a look at the thought process that my partners and I undertook to figure out what kind of airplane we should buy. In this one, I’ll share the lessons learned in finding the airplane, getting inspections, and structuring our purchase with an LLC.

Finding the Airplane

After poking around on the usual aircraft listing websites, we started off our search for the perfect Cessna 182 with a broker. Using a broker is a bit of a mixed bag — a great one can make the process a piece of cake, while a bad one can make it an expensive nightmare.

Luckily, our broker was pretty good.

The big benefits of a broker are that you have someone who can give you an opinion on whether an issue on a 40 year old aircraft should be a deal breaker for you, and someone who can negotiate with the seller and figure out the pile of paperwork involved with the transaction. In short, they help smooth the process for everyone.

The search process is actually one of the most fun parts of airplane shopping — so while a broker can sometimes find “pocket listings” of planes that haven’t hit the web yet, you’ll probably want to do a lot of the actual search yourself. We’d whittled down a list of a few aircraft before we engaged our broker.

Interestingly enough, the airplane we were most interested in, a 1979 Cessna 182Q, also happened to be represented by the same brokerage firm. This was great for a couple of reasons: first, it gave us a direct line to the sellers, and second, it meant that we wouldn’t have to pay a brokerage fee if we decided to buy that airplane.

After a few years of being a member of a small flying club that owned a Piper Archer, the idea of getting a bigger, faster airplane was bouncing around in my head. And I wasn’t the only one.

One friend wanted something that could haul his growing family. Another wanted something faster. I was feeling the itch too. I’d gotten a taste of higher performance flying while working on my commercial certificate in a Socata Trinidad, and ever since then, the Archer seemed a whole lot slower.

We’d kicked around the idea of adding something bigger to our existing club, but most members weren’t that interested.

Not that that settled things for those of us who still were…

Ultimately, a few of us decided to split off from the club to buy something of our own.

This series focuses on some of the lessons learned along the way — I’ll update this blog post with links to the follow-ups as they come out.

The first question we faced was what kind of airplane we should look for — there’s no shortage of options. A quick glance at a major used airplane listing site like ASO.com or Barnstormers shows that there are scores of different makes and models available in most price ranges, from Cessnas to Citabrias to Cirruses.

When you’re looking to step up from a trainer-class airplane (like a Piper Archer or a Cessna 172), the big questions you need to ask are what your typical mission looks like, and what the practical considerations are.

Obviously, more capable plans require more capable budgets, and buying something that fits 85% of your needs is probably the smart way to go. For us, we needed more useful load, not necessarily more seats. In other words, a four-place plane was fine, but it had to actually be capable of hauling four adults. And it had to do it a little faster than the Archer.

The practical considerations were budget, of course, as well as things like whether we wanted to delve into the world of a retract. High performance (defined by the FAA as having greater than 200 horsepower) was basically guaranteed given our mission.

The Bellanca Viking is a beautiful complex airplane — and the entry price is much lower than the Cessna and Piper competition. (Photo from Wikipedia)

When it comes to buying an airplane, brand matters. Your aviation dollar goes a lot further when buying something like a Bellanca Super Viking than a Cessna 182 of the same vintage. The market clearly values popular airframes that are still in production — the upside is that anyone can work on a 182, but you pay more for that privilege.

It’s up to you to weigh which of those things matter more, although I’ll say that you can get some really outstanding deals on phenomenal airplanes by looking outside Cessnas, Pipers, and Cirri.

Initially, I was all for a complex plane. But because we were a pretty diverse group in terms of flying experience, it made sense to stick with fixed gear. Not only did that mean lower ongoing maintenance costs (no gear system to break), but it also meant much, much lower insurance premiums.

Gear up landings remain a huge perceived risk to insurers.

A Piper PA-28-236 Dakota, the high performance fixed-gear version of the Piper Cherokee. (Photo from Wikipedia)

At first, we started looking closely at the Piper Dakota — the high-performance version of the Piper Archer that we’d all had plenty of experience flying.

The Dakota is a great airplane. It’s got a great useful load, and it’s not that different from the Archer we’d all been partners in. But ultimately, our attention started swaying to its primary rival, the Cessna 182.

Cessna’s 182 Skylane is one of the most popular aircraft models ever built — it’s the high-performance step-up from the super popular Cessna 172 Skyhawk, and it’s nearly as ubiquitous, with more than 23,000 Cessna 182s built since 1956.

In a lot of ways, finding the perfect plane is a matter of compromises — and the 182 is a jack of all trades…

It has a spacious cabin and hauls a ton, yet it only has four seats (which is great for insurance rates). It’s faster than a trainer, but it’s really not “fast” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s pricey, but parts are plentiful and any mechanic knows how to work on one. For all of those reasons (and more), many operators consider it the perfect airplane — and we ultimately decided we were in that group too.

From that decision, price helped inform a lot of the more nuanced decisions — like model year. But we came into the search with a pretty good idea of the kind of avionics and equipment we wanted in the plane. The Archer in the club we were leaving was very well equipped, with a WAAS GPS and all the accoutrements you’d need to fly in the modern system.

That was a must — we didn’t want to downgrade our avionics to upgrade the airplane.

(Ironically, that ended up being moot when we totally upgraded the 182’s panel — more details coming on that in a future post!)

So, that’s how our search started. In the next installment, I’ll tell you about the lessons learned in finding the airplane, getting inspections, and structuring our purchase with an LLC.

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Disclaimer: While I am a flight instructor, I am not your flight instructor (probably) -- the content on this blog doesn't constitute flight or ground instruction. Instead, it's made up of my thoughts, opinions, and wild guesses. Always be sure to check with your CFI before applying anything you see here in an airplane. Fly safe!